


Glitch in the System: Venganza

by SystemGlitch



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-08 14:04:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12866088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SystemGlitch/pseuds/SystemGlitch
Summary: An (apparently) five-part arc detailing Sombra's revenge for the last four-part arc.Part 1: Fight Sounds, by E.Part 2: Cuts You Up, by K.Part 3: Destroy Everything You Touch, by E.Part 4: Policy of Truth, by K.Part 5: Self Control, by E.





	1. Fight Sounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By E.   
> A cold dish of revenge is served.

Sombra was awoken by the quiet, persistent buzz of an alarm pinging repeatedly inside her head, a racket only she could hear. As was intended.

“Ugh,  _qué_?” she cursed sleepily, rolling out of Widow’s embrace to press her face into her pillow. “It’s too early for this shit.”

Widowmaker opened her eyes, none of the sleepy stupor Sombra experienced on a daily basis present in her expression as consciousness hit her like a truck.  _Semper paratus_ , and whatnot. “Who are you talking to, Sombra?” she asked measuredly, her tone only slightly patronizing.

“Someone who’s about to have a shit of a day,” the hacker replied, sitting up against her pillow in the darkness and summoning her console before her. The bright purple illuminated her face, fingers racing over the hard light display as she sorted through a series of numbers and data files as they appeared on the screen.

Widowmaker rolled onto her elbow to eavesdrop, resting her head on the hacker’s shoulder and drawing lazy circles on her hip in time with Sombra’s own tapping at her display. After a moment, one screen stopped blinking as a map, location, and stream of binary filled the screen.

“Gotcha,” she grinned, swiping it away. She placed a hurried kiss on Widow’s tousled head of hair and jumped out of bed, stalking over to her dresser to grab a fistful of pyjama and yank them onto her body. Leaning over, she picked up Widowmaker’s robe and tossed it onto the bed where the confused spider looked at it, the uncertainty in her face hilariously out of place on what was typically a blank canvas of emotional apathy.

“What are you doing?” she asked, pushing the blankets aside, pulling the robe over her bare arms, and wrapping it around her waist.

“Get dressed and meet me downstairs,” Sombra said, excitement carrying her quickly to the door, purple-tinted hair flying behind her. “Today is the day we get revenge.”

* * *

“Let me make sure I understand,” Akande stated in a slow, deliberate repetition of Sombra’s last fifteen minutes of enthusiastic exposition about her discovery that morning. His hands were curled around a mug of black coffee, still steaming. “You set a trap within the network of the people who hacked you designed to alert you when their system was vulnerable to attack. Now you want to launch a mission  _against_  them so that you can steal their cybernetic-hacking virus and,” he paused, looking at her pointedly, “get revenge?”

Sombra grinned. “ _Sí._ ”

“ _When_ , exactly, did you set this up?” he asked, eyebrow raised in question.

“In my spare time,” she replied evasively. Gabriel snorted out a laugh and rolled his eyes. “What? I’m running out of corporations to vex,  _amigos_. Plus, I’m still pretty pissed at them for that shit they pulled.” She stretched her shoulder, phantom pains emphasizing her words. The spider winced as she did, and Sombra dropped her arm, feeling bad for reminding her of the old injury and the scars it had left on them both.

“Have they attempted any more sabotage?” Akande asked, clearly struggling with what to do with the information she’d brought him.

“No; I’ve been doing daily sweeps of the systems since the last time and I set up a network of malware to infect any incoming snoops. I was just being lazy before,” she admitted without shame. “They made me mad - now  _no one_  is getting in.” She gave the room a smug look. “I’d like to thank them for the lesson in diligence, face to face, with violence.”

“Last time we engaged with them you were nearly killed,” Widow said, eyes narrowed and arms crossed, and even Akande turned at the vitriol in her voice as she spoke.

“Last time we were being invited to stick our heads in the mouth of a bear trap,” Sombra replied, unwavering in her critical glance in Akande’s direction. “This time they’re not expecting us.  _This_  time we’re doing it my way.”

“And what exactly is ‘your way’?” Akande asked, steepling his fingers in front of his face to hide the slow, approving smile growing behind them.

“I access the system remotely and disable their automated defense systems. If they have omnic combatants guarding the place, they’ll be neutralized before we even get there, leaving us with only flesh and blood to contend with.” She shrugged. “I can hack them, too, if you’d prefer, but this breach won’t last forever and bullets are a lot faster than social engineering.” She kicked her feet over the armrest of the old plush chair she was sitting in, calling up her hard light interface before her. “I already hacked their internal camera network, so we’ve got eyes on the inside. It’ll be like harpooning fish in a barrel, with time left over to watch them fry.”

“Your confidence is inspiring, but are you sure you’re not being brash?” Akande replied, watching her closely as she spoke.

“Like you, you mean?” she said, quickly continuing before Akande could scold her for her attitude. “I’ve mapped out their entire base of operations, from the core network to the dinky PC they use to watch porn in the boss’s office. They’ll be sitting ducks,  _jefe_  - I promise.”

Akande sat quietly for a moment, fingertips together and expression unreadable.

“What do you need from us?” he replied finally, and Sombra congratulated herself silently while pointedly ignoring the angry heat coming off Widowmaker across the room.

“An hour,” she said, dropping the display and hopping off the couch. “And a very, very large coffee.”

* * *

Widowmaker stopped her as she walked happily from the room, head high and shoulders back as she reveled in getting her way. The spider’s fingertips brushed lightly against her forearm, but despite the hesitance of her touch, there was something forceful that made Sombra stop, turn, and tilt her head.

“ _Qué pasó, araña_?” she asked, brows furrowed to match the hint of concern in Widowmaker’s impassive expression.

“I am worried,” she said, dropping her hand. “Last time, they shot you.”

Sombra shrugged it off, unconcerned. “Beginner’s luck. I wasn’t expecting them to flood me with viral code.”

“They are unpredictable,” Widow retorted, expression shifting ever so slightly from concern to frustration. It was an art form, discerning her emotional shifts. Sombra wasn’t even sure the spider herself was cognizant of them half the time.

“That’s why I’m laying the groundwork. Predictability doesn’t mean shit if you’re the one being ambushed.” She held her arms out and smiled widely. “And it will be a trap this time, too - just with us on the other side of the cage.”

The spider stood for a long time, eyes searching Sombra’s closely. “There is nothing more?” she asked.

“No, Widow - I just want some digital revenge.” Sombra smiled, curling her fingers around the waist of the sniper’s jeans and pulling her in for a kiss. “It’ll be like a date. A really bloody, violent date.”

Widow offered her the barest of smiles. “Will there be wine?”

“I’ll make sure there’s a bottle of the finest red awaiting our return.” Sombra kissed her again, ignoring the small, unfamiliar twinge of guilt she felt wriggling about in her belly.

She told herself, with some degree of belief in her own assertions, that what the spider didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

* * *

Sombra’s gun rattled off three rounds into the body of a fallen soldier, silencing him for good. She grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and dumped him on the ground, stepping awkwardly over his corpse to get to the computer console he’d been sitting at. His back had been turned to them as they made their approach, rendering him unaware of their presence as he’d hollered into the mic for the omnic reinforcements to activate.

They, of course, had never heard his call, shut down remotely by a wave of Sombra’s hand before Talon had even stepped into the perimeter of the warehouse. It was almost childishly simple; she’d been hacking omnics since she was thirteen, and their internal systems hadn’t changed dramatically in the nearly two decades since that time. Technology, it seemed, got as lazy as its human creators once it attained sapience.

Leaning over, her fingers hovered above the keyboard as she reviewed her options. There were a few ways in: vents, back door, or the direct route. Only one would serve her purpose. After a moment of consideration, she waved her hand, bringing a map up on the screen.

“There,” she pointed, a pulse of red illuminating where her finger pressed into the hard light. “Central database lives there. We’re close.”

“Let’s go,” Gabe said, mask in place over his scarred visage. Widowmaker nodded at him and the two of them headed into the next room to scout.

They stepped through two black doors that pushed outward into the central warehouse, placing them immediately behind a stack of pallets piled high with rolls of paper and unlabeled boxes. It provided decent enough cover, but very little in the way of tactical positioning. After doing a preliminary sweep of the visible area and finding no immediate threats, Gabriel made his way along the perimeter to the left while Sombra and Widowmaker cautiously climbed a set of metal stairs to the catwalk a few feet above the ground.

The warehouse was large and the floor was ostensibly empty of people but filled with all manner of physical goods providing hiding spots and vantage points in spades. It was hard to tell what this place operated as during the daytime - probably home improvement supplies storage, judging from the bags of granite and shelves filled with 2x4 plywood boards. It was a good front for a criminal enterprise, if she thought about it - plenty of cover, and any loud noises would be excused by the populace as a fact of manufacturing.

 _Not bad_ , she thought, slipping behind a stack of boxes as Widowmaker pulled herself up onto one of the shelving units, lithe and quiet as a cat on the prowl, and laying down on her belly in one fluid, silent motion.

Sombra pulled up her screen to sync with the sniper’s infra-sight as she cased the area. There was no way they were actually alone, and sure enough, Sombra saw five shapes on her screen. Settling in for the show, Sombra listened to her take aim.

_Pop._

Sombra watched as one of the small red human shapes on her screen toppled to the ground in time with the shot.

_Pop._

Another.

_Pop._

And another, this one followed by the sounds of Gabriel’s shotguns in quick succession as he flanked their attack.

“That’s all of them,” Sombra announced as the spider leaped gracefully down from her perch. She disengaged her visor, golden eyes peering out from the shadows.

“I know,” she said darkly, sounding satisfied with her work. She always sounded different immediately after she’d made a kill, the adrenaline still coursing fresh within her.

The hacker smiled: the spider looked loveliest in the afterglow of her work. “Hey, you wanna maybe uh,” she said, stepping up and wrapping her arms slowly around Widow’s waist, “take a break?”

The sniper smiled, slight and almost imperceptible, but she made no move to extract herself until they both heard someone loudly clearing their throat behind them. Widowmaker raised an eyebrow and Sombra rolled her eyes dramatically.

“Later, then,” she said, unwrapping herself from Widowmaker and stepping back to lean against the metal railing.

“Let’s do a final round of the room and get in there,” Gabriel suggested in his perpetually-exasperated deadpan.

The two agents began to fan slowly outward from their position, Widowmaker continuing down the catwalk to the right and Gabriel turning to head for the back of the room. Sombra used their distraction to her advantage, quickly calling up a small hexagonal screen at her side. A swipe and the press of two buttons did the trick; had they been looking, Widowmaker and Gabriel would have seen a shimmer of digital purple code fall from her fingertips in time with a pulse of light from her screen.

The metal security door across the warehouse floor began, ponderously, to close, the grating sound of the heavy door catching both operatives’ attention immediately.

“Sombra?” Gabriel growled, his intonation implying she ought to do something about it.

“No dice, boss - that’s being done from the other side.” The lie slipped off her tongue with practiced ease. “Better make a run for it.” It was easy to tell, even from their distant vantage point, that the door was closing faster than any of them could reach it. It didn’t stop Sombra, however. Leaping over the railing, she bolted for the doors full-tilt with a smile spreading across her face as she ran.

Widowmaker hissed audibly into their shared frequency. “What are you doing?” she asked, locked into position as the hacker made haste for the door, ready to nail anyone who came for her while failing to suppress a growl of frustration at Sombra’s predictably-unpredictable actions.

“Going in the front door,” was Sombra’s only reply. Unclipping a translocator from her belt, she avoided the open space of the warehouse floor, opting to run along the side of the fenced walkway instead, finally leaping over the guardrail and booking it for the doors. She dropped to her knees, slid several feet across the polished floor, and threw the small metal device as far and as fast as she could. It whistled as it cut through the air, slipping underneath the doorway at the last possible minute. The door slammed shut as she slid up to it, one hand on the ground to steady herself before she stood up.

“I’ll handle it from here,” she said, offering the distant sniper a sly wink and a wave as she vanished from sight.


	2. Cuts You Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By K.  
> A big mistake happens.

Had anyone else proposed their mission - had it been Gabriel or Akande pitching the quest for revenge - Widowmaker knew with uncomfortable immediacy she would never have harbored the suspicion she did knowing it was Sombra. That recognition carried with it a twinge of guilt, a burdensome little weight sitting lopsided in her chest that felt equally warranted and traitorous. Among Talon’s ranks, Sombra stood out as the person she trusted most, theirs being the only remotely intimate relationship she accepted - in any sense of the word. Yet, she questioned the hacker’s motives all the same, and for no reason other than that the whole thing read as ostensibly, impractically  _convenient._ **  
**

Talon, of course, was an organization well acquainted with opportunity as readily as meticulous organization; Widowmaker, appropriately, understood, accepted, and often embraced the necessity of the rare slapdash jaunt into unfamiliar territory. Even those, however, tended to have some greater amount of planning involved - a day, at least; this, on the other hand, felt uniquely brash. Appropriate, given its arbiter, but worrisome all the same.

Still, she’d promised Sombra her assistance when the time for vengeance came, and Widowmaker was far from inclined to renege on that agreement. If anything, she owed it to the hacker; though Sombra would argue otherwise - had argued otherwise time and time again - Widowmaker still cultivated a nagging responsibility for their first, failed endeavor against this otherwise unremarkable organization and the injury Sombra suffered therein. That feeling came and went, slow and steady as her own heartbeat as it oscillated between searing guilt and its absence as time progressed. Though the spaces between its appearances grew longer, the sniper couldn’t quite find the tools or ability to prevent them altogether.

She sat through Sombra’s proposal in almost uninterrupted silence, breaking it only once to offer the until-then unspoken but tacitly understood reminder that their first engagement nearly cost Sombra an arm, if not her life. No one had forgotten, of course, but that it should go without saying seemed, at least to her, grossly negligent. If so little planning the first time had such disastrous results, why should they expect anything better the second time?

“Last time we engaged with them, you were nearly killed,” she offered, far more venomously than intended; so much so that the rest of her concern - that they were, once again, charging in blind - died on her lips. Even Akande seemed to notice the stringency of her statement, but offered it only passing interest in the form of a raised eyebrow.

As the meeting proceeded, that venom became harder to place. She wanted to call it fear, but devoid of its physiological manifestation, Widowmaker couldn’t identify the source. She was regularly so good at parsing the firing of synapses into what would, in anyone else, be observable emotional stimuli; without them, she was left uncomfortably clueless. There was no activation of a flight or fight response, no palpable feeling other than the weighted guilt which underscored the entirety of their situation.

As Sombra continued, Widowmaker filed the conceptual feeling under “dread” and set it aside. She attempted to placate it, approaching the other woman after Akande agreed to her proposal, but she couldn’t find the means by which to articulate that concern - that suspicion at the convenience of it all.

“There is nothing more?” she asked, fingers curled about Sombra’s wrist in a wordless entreaty for something, anything else that might make the whole thing make more sense.

“No, Widow - I just want some digital revenge,” Sombra replied, offering a plaintive smile as she tugged her closer. “It’ll be like a date. A really bloody, violent date.”

Widowmaker studied Sombra a long moment, as if the crook of her smile or brush of fingers against her waist might yield some further evidence for her suspicion. Finding nothing, the sniper assumed of herself an unfair doubt of her partner and, with some effort, swallowed that mistrust in an attempt to take Sombra’s proposal at face value.

“Will there be wine?” she asked, forcing a grin.

* * *

All things considered, the mission was going well - better than she’d expected. So much so that Widowmaker found it surprisingly easy to shelve her suspicion and its associated guilt as unnecessary, if not silly. Talon’s presence was, as promised, entirely unexpected, offering them a welcome element of surprise that made their first handful of kills delightfully seamless. She lived for the hard kills: the shots borne of honed reflex, instinct, and timing that no one else on earth could make; still, there was something effusively satisfying about an ambush, the way realization flickered across a man’s face in the half-second between impact and death. In that instant, even the hardest human knew fear, and Widowmaker was eminently capable of acquainting others with it.

Following Sombra up the stairs to the steel-grate catwalk above, the sniper nodded to Gabriel as he disappeared into the shadows harboring the perimeter of the ground floor. They rarely, if ever, required communication in this regard; years of experience evened into a pattern: she took the high ground, Reaper the low. What threats she couldn’t eliminate in one or, at worst, two shots, he could handle. Beyond that, they operated almost as if by clockwork, Gabriel flanking the opposition while she controlled the field from above.

It appeared this would, in fact, turn out to be just another mission.

As they reached the second story landing, the sniper immediately pinpointed her position: a shelving unit a few paces ahead, its topmost platform a meter or two above the catwalk - tall enough to provide a perfect panorama of the room while making her a nearly impossible target from below. Widowmaker scaled the shelving with ease, rolled onto her stomach, and tapped the module that activated her visor.

After a split-second of darkness, her infra-sight revealed the warehouse around them in a monotone of blaring red. In addition to Gabriel prowling row to row, five figures moved amongst the stacks, all perfectly vulnerable from her current elevation. Predictably, Reaper clung to the outermost walls of the room, moving toward the back to attack from behind; her job, then, was to buy him time.

She leveled her aim on the nearest soldier, slid her finger past the trigger guard, and let instinct take over.

The first shot hit its mark, slipping through the target’s throat as if it were tissue paper. He crumpled, hands pressed uselessly to the wound, as the others hefted their guns and ran to attend their ally.

The second shot painted a stack of boxes and plywood with vibrant arterial spray as it blew through the side of the soldier’s head mid-sprint, the blood indistinct in hue from the rest of her rendered panorama.

The third stopped a man dead in his tracks as his shoulder and clavicle shattered on impact.

As the last of the enemy operatives arrived on the scene, Gabriel appeared behind them in a noiseless swathe of inky mist, pressing the muzzle of each gun indelicately against their scalps as he fired. Widowmaker watched from on high, steeped in the heady adrenaline of the kill that slithered through her veins like electricity.

“That’s all of them,” Sombra noted from below.

The room cleared, Widowmaker slid effortlessly off her perch to rejoin the hacker. “I know,” she murmured, disengaging her visor with the ghost of a smile. As she turned her attention to the floor below, Sombra was there, arms around her waist with an offer for more, then Reaper, appearing from thin air with a disproving cough.

“Let’s do a final round and get in there,” he growled, turning on his heel toward the opposite catwalk. Widowmaker complied, shouldering past Sombra to mirror Gabriel’s trajectory from across the room. As they moved across the upper level in a nearly perfect pantomime, the main door leading into the warehouse proper lurched suddenly, the grate of metal against metal snarling an imperative for which they hadn’t prepared.

“Sombra?” Gabriel asked - but Sombra was already moving, leaping over the second-story railing with ease and sprinting for the closing doors.  

“What are you  _doing_?” Widowmaker hissed, welding the stock of her gun to her cheek on the off-chance reinforcements were waiting or on their way. As she followed the hacker’s trajectory through the scope of the Widow’s Kiss, she felt suspicion come creeping back like so many needles, sharp and cold.

“Going in the front door,” was the hacker’s sole response as she chucked a translocator beacon beneath the door. “I’ll handle it from here.”

Widowmaker watched as Sombra flickered out of existence, lowering her gun to level a glance in Gabriel’s direction. Even beneath the mask, his seething was apparent in the arch of his shoulders and the rigidity of his posture, as if braced for the worst.

At least they were on the same page.

Examining the room, she considered their options; with the main doors closed, they were left with two choices: the back doors or the air vent ducts. The former would be logistically easier, but likely much more heavily guarded; the latter was stealthier, but meant Widowmaker would be going in alone. Gabriel was a lot of things, but “air duct size” was assuredly not one of them. With an exasperated sigh, she crossed to the end of the walkway, glancing upwards to the vent grille, just a meter or so outside her reach.

“I will follow her,” she said flatly, lifting an arm and firing her grappling hook; it pierced the flimsy metal easily, and with a few, firm tugs dislodged from its frame entirely. “Better than going in blind from behind.”

Gabriel nodded from across the room as she plucked the grating from the prongs of her grapple. “Don’t let her get you killed,” he grunted. Widowmaker merely returned his nod, shouldered her rifle, and with a few steadying backwards steps took a running leap at the vent, catching its edge by her fingertips and sheer luck alone. Hefting herself into the ductwork, she pulled herself through the narrow, cobwebbed space by her elbows, keeping her motions as small as possible to avoid making her presence known — a feat made more difficult by the gun shoved against her back by the top of the corridor. Relying on the slivers of light from between the neatly spaced grilles, the sniper wriggled her way from port to port until she found what seemed to be the most practical exit: the view was narrow, but it appeared to let out just above another raised catwalk abutting what she assumed from her limited visibility was some sort of recessed second floor alcove. Beyond the walkway, she could just make out the ground floor of the warehouse.

“Almost in,” she murmured. Gabriel mumbled his acknowledgement as she slid thin fingertips between the grating and pushed, applying measured force to the panel in attempt to dislodge it without drawing any attention. The task proved more difficult than she preferred - unsurprising, given how little leverage was available in her position, but the steel ultimately gave way with a gentle creak she hoped would be more readily attributed to the structure itself.

She waited a moment, two, ensuring that no suspicions had been raised by the sound, then shimmied halfway out of the vent, deposited the pane of metal atop a neighboring shelf, and then pushed herself to freedom.

Before her, the raised walkway fanned out to the left and right, lined with a narrow railing; behind her was, as expected, a recessed second floor lined with more boxes and a few holopanels adjacent a stairway to the first floor. Creeping toward the metal seam between the alcove and walkway, Widowmaker peered over the edge and glimpsed Sombra, surrounded by six, seven men, all but one of whom had guns raised and pointed at the hacker. They were speaking, but she couldn’t make out the words or tone of the conversation and, most importantly,  _there were six men with their weapons trained on Sombra_.

Rolling to the far left of the walkway, Widowmaker lifted her rifle into position, took aim, and fired; in a fraction of a second, the unarmed man was down, his skull bursting out the back of his head in a spray of bone and brain and blood as he toppled to the ground. In an instant, everyone scattered - Sombra taking cover as the rest of the enemy agents searched for the source of the shot.

Bolting to the opposite side of the runway, Widowmaker slid into position. “Are you okay?” she asked into her comms, aiming and firing a second time.

“I had it handled, Widow!” Sombra replied sharply.

Rising to her feet, the sniper leveled her sights on a third soldier. “There were six men with guns pointed at you,” she began, pulling the trigger. “That does not sound like a situation you had — oh!”

As if from nowhere, one of the enemy troops cleared the staircase and the space between them, curling an arm around her throat from behind. His grip was firm, but she was fast, and in an instant the sniper brought the butt of her gun around in a sharp arc that ended the side of his ribcage. It was enough to slip from his grasp, but  her reduced range of motion meant it wasn’t enough to stop him outright. He doubled back immediately - just enough time for Widowmaker to turn to face him - and threw his entire weight against her, sending her back against the railing, the impact sharp and surprising enough that it sent her rifle clattering to the floor.

“ _Sombra_!” she growled, imploring the other woman for backup as the man bore down on her.

Curling a fist, she decked him squarely in the nose, then again in the jaw; though the first connected beautifully, the second only glanced its target, and that lone instant of inertia was exactly enough time needed for the enemy troop to draw the knife sheathed at his side and bury it in her abdomen.

At first, Widowmaker hardy acknowledged the impact or the blossoming Lichtenberg configuration of pain that followed it as real; she felt it like the edge of a dream upon consciousness, extant but somehow entirely detached from existence She knew she screamed, but didn’t hear it; she knew, vaguely, of Sombra’s appearance behind her attacker, but wasn’t entirely sure she saw it. Awareness dawned in the space between breaths that came, suddenly, with so much more difficulty - the wave of pain spreading like a wildfire, the lameness of her own grip around the knife’s handle as she tried, failed, tried again to dislodge it, and, lastly, the sudden, rough shove that sent her backwards over the railing.

Awareness dawned suddenly, and then it was gone.


	3. Destroy Everything You Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By E.   
> The seeds of regret happen.

Sombra reappeared on the other side of the door, her body regenerating in a flickering digital haze. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, being pulled on a molecular level through time and space only to be reconstituted almost immediately in a different location. Computationally, it was rife with room for error, requiring constant calibrations she didn’t think most people knew about or could appreciate if they did; theoretically it shouldn’t even be possible. In actuality, it was something she never  _quite_  got used to and couldn’t  _quite_  make herself enjoy, but it was a novelty only she possessed, and that was enough to counter the occasional nausea or sense of displacement. Not even the Oxton girl could claim the same freedom.  _She_  didn’t have a choice in it; Sombra took her tech and wrangled it into something she could actually use.

As her wits came back to her and she regained her bearings, her surroundings began to clear and she assessed the situation she’d thrust herself into.

It was, primarily, a room filled with men. Holding guns. Pointed at her.

“ _Qué onda_?” she asked cheerfully, lifting a hand to wave. That action earned her a round of clicking safeties being disengaged from around the room. She counted them quickly - there were six men, three on either side, all flanking one unarmed man in the center.  _Must be the boss_ , she surmised, dropping her hand as she rolled her eyes at the nervous guards. The room itself was cleared at the center where the men had congregated, with plenty of warehouse paraphernalia littering the shelving along the sides.

“Not quite the warm welcome I’d hoped for,” she joked, shrugging. “You gonna offer me a seat or is this another trap? Because frankly, if the latter, then I’m disappointed by the lack of finesse you guys seem so fond of using.”

The room remained silent but for the sound of breathing and the phantom thumping of beating hearts. Sombra and the man in the center stared at each other intently for the space of a minute; then, with a wave of his hand, the others lowered their guns, albeit slowly, and none of them seemed inclined to set them down.

“You made quite the entrance,”

“Matin, right?” Sombra asked, putting a hand on her hip and holding her gun idly from the other hand. The tight line of the man’s lips was answer enough for her. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed. Our last meeting was a hard act to follow.”

“You killed my men.”

“You seemed willing enough to let them die.” She raised an eyebrow. “You knew I was coming.”

Matin did not seem to have a good response for her, opting to cross his arms over his chest, glaring in frustration. “You’ve made yourself quite the pest lately, Sombra.”

Sombra laughed - casual, unconcerned, and deeply patronizing. “ _Have_ I? Sorry about that, I guess I was under the impression you lot enjoyed playing fast and loose with your lives considering you  _tried to fucking kill me_ once.”

“I didn’t; that was Kiran.”

Sombra chuckled. “None of you ever bothered to introduce yourselves to me so I have to just assume you’re all working toward the same goal. Now,” she said, holding out a hand and wagging her fingers, “do you have what I’m here for or do I have to harry you for another two months? That data worm I set loose isn’t going to deactivate itself, after all, and there is  _plenty_  more sensitive intel for it to gobble up.”

Matin frowned, looking at the man immediately to his left. He nodded, and the man reached into a bag to withdraw a small, angular chip that glowed dully in the pale light of the warehouse. Matin took it from him and held it out, gingerly pinched between two fingers.

“Here,” he said, holding it up. “The virus you requested.”

“If it hasn’t been neutered I swear on the graves of your dead that I’ll find you -  _again_  - and kill everyone you love.”

Matin’s nostrils flared, but otherwise his neutral expression remained intact. “It’s safe.”

“You wouldn’t mind my testing it, yes?” she asked, grinning a direct challenge at the man.

Matin exhaled measuredly. “Of course not.”

Sombra gestured to his arm; a state of the art cybernetic replica of the missing flesh and blood it was meant to replace. “That’s got data ports, doesn’t it?”

Matin sighed, nodded, and inserted the chip. The light blue glow from the device increased in intensity, eventually washing over his entire arm in a wave of light, after which it dwindled down to a small blue spec indicating it was on, active, and ready for use.

“It’s safe,” he said again, holding out his arm, wrist up, for her to examine. “Disconnect from our network, wipe it clean of your bugs, and we’ll never have to speak again. That was the deal.”

“Let me just -” Sombra said, taking a step forward to get closer to examine it. Like triggering a bomb, the guns were immediately raised back up, and she sighed dramatically. “This is going to get very old very quickly,” she said, her voice colored by displeasure.

Matin looked ready to respond, but any words he may have been poised to share with her died on his lips before he could speak them. Sombra could only guess as to why this was the case, but her assumption was that it was because of the bullet that came racing out of nowhere to intersect with the front of his skull.

He fell to the ground as her jaw followed suit, the assault entirely unexpected. A moment later, the room erupted into chaos.

Sombra dove for cover behind a pallet of boxes, scrambling out of the line of fire. “What the hell?” she cursed, immediately activating her camo. There was another shot issued from the same location, dropping another one of the crew to the floor as the rest of them desperately sought cover from the unknown assailant.

A voice in her ear offered a greater depth to the clarity already developing in her mind. “Are you ok?” the deadpan voice of the spider said.

“I had it handled, Widow!” she hissed, back pressed against the contents of the pallet. This was an utterly royal fuckup, indeed, although she’d be hard pressed to say where the blame truly lay at this juncture. She peeked out from her hiding spot to see the remaining five men scrambling for their own cover, shooting for the rafters as they desperately searched for the sniper taking them out one by one.

“There were six men with guns pointed at you,” was Widowmaker’s annoyed reply, followed immediately by the sound of another shot and another body hitting the concrete. “That does not sound like a situation you had - oh!” Her chastisement was cut off by a startled yelp, something uncharacteristic of the spider on a good day - and this was very quickly devolving into a very _bad_  day.

Concealed from sight, Sombra broke away from her cover, leaping over a dead body in pursuit of their fallen leader. Flattening herself to the ground, she grabbed his arm, stuck her nails into the sleek metal of his cybernetic, and pulled on the chip as hard as she could.

With an audible pop, it fell out into her palm, blue light dying back to a gentle glow. She shoved it into one of her pockets and pushed herself to her feet, darting to the hiding spot of one of Matin’s men cowering behind a pallet jack. Dropping her camo as she slid behind him, she brought her gun up and executed him before he could turn around.

“ _Sombra_!” The desperation in Widow’s voice snapped Sombra to attention like a splash of cold water. Activating her camo again, she chanced the open floor and made for the sniper’s location.

She couldn’t find the stairs, so she took the direct route. Once she’d stepped away from the wall, she could see the shadows of two people struggling in one of the many enclosed catwalks that circled the storeroom. Unsnapping a translocator, she gritted her teeth, and heaved it into the air.

It hadn’t even landed when she materialized upon it, soaking the momentum of the last few feet with her body as she smacked gracelessly into a wall. Ignoring the pain of impact, she looked across the grating to see Widowmaker locked in hand-to-hand combat with one of Matin’s hired hands. Clearly he hadn’t trusted her - smart - and placed some insurance around the room. That same insurance was now cashing in on the sniper.

Sombra pushed herself to her feet and ran for the struggling duo, scrabbling for her gun as she moved. There was shouting below and sounds of confusion in a language she didn’t understand, but the gunfire had stopped which was more than enough good news for her in that harried moment of panic.

For all her experience with time and the manipulation of space relative it, there was nothing she could do to slow the events happening before her. In hindsight, it happened very slowly - the flash of the dagger in the dim light, the horrified look on Widow’s face as it sunk into her stomach - but in the moment it felt too fast to be real.

Widow’s scream of pain as she crashed over the railing would haunt her for a very long time.

Sombra wasn’t sure what it was she shouted at the man after he pushed Widow, but she was aware of some sort of vocalization coming from her. Maybe it was just a scream - she couldn’t be sure. What she did know was that in the next thirty seconds she had beat him to death with the butt of her pistol, skin and small flecks of shattered bone decorating the whimsical pink and gold of her gun like a poor attempt at a Halloween prop.

Quickly scanning the room, it seemed as though the remaining men had fled, taking the body of their boss with them. It also sounded as though they’d met Reaper on the way out, if the succession of shotgun blasts and shouting was any indication. Sombra tossed another translocator and followed it down to the floor with as much finesse as before, tumbling down beside Widowmaker on the cold stone ground.

Crawling over, Sombra pressed her hand against the sniper’s body to stem the flow of blood coming from the knife wound, simultaneously leaning down to check for signs of life. For a moment Sombra’s blood chilled in her veins until she remembered the woman’s slowed heart rate. She was breathing, but out cold, and she’d need attention for the wound in her abdomen. A growing puddle of blood was welling from under her dark hair where her skull had made impact with the ground. Sombra looked up at the catwalk - it had to have been a seven foot fall.

Mouth dry and pulse racing, she gathered the spider close to her, the dark blood slicking her arms and making it hard not to drop the limp body as she ran for the exit.

Head wounds always bled more than you expected.


	4. Policy of Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By K.  
> Reconciliation happens.

“Amélie.”

Through the unfathomable depths of sleep, a voice called a dust shrouded name. It echoed across vast, empty space, its origin leagues above and away until it reached her: a whisper, drifting past on a slow-moving current. Though the tone and timbre were familiar to her, they were only so with the transient familiarity of childhood memories: there, then gone, then presumed forever passed both in time and relevancy.

“ _Amélie._ ”

She struggled to place with any certainty the provenance of this one-word demand for rejoinder. It was not warm. It was not ragged. It was not firm. Of the voices most familiar to her, this was not among them; yet, she felt it like a lash all the same, dragging her from the sprawling black into a light she didn’t notice until it was suddenly, blindingly there.

“ _There_  you are.”

Widowmaker, thrust violently back into consciousness, blinked hard against the light. At first, that’s all there was: searing, artificial fluorescence that felt to her torpor-addled eye on par with the sun itself. With the passage of seconds, shadows, then shapes crept into existence, their edges ephemeral though their subjects were inarguably real.

Then, no more than a minute later, there was pain.

Universal, consuming pain snarled white-hot fire with every breath and beat of her heart, so furious at its own existence she thought, for a moment, she could discern with horrifying acuity the presence and location of every nerve she possessed. The initial onslaught gave way to awareness of a few exceptionally tender areas: waist, side, and shoulder, where honed agony coursed mercilessly across nerves frayed by, assumedly, hours of much the same. Through the fog of dawning consciousness, she recalled - albeit vaguely - a dry elaboration on that prolonged sort of suffering:

“ _Colloquially, we refer to this as ‘quantitative pain’: frequent and durative exposure to deleterious physical stimuli lasting minutes, hours, days, and so on._ ”

It was such a casual definition, delivered with practiced, clipped eloquence so far removed from the topic question it may as well have been a poetic recitation of Shakespeare.

And then it - recognition - hit her, hard and mercilessly with the first wave of nausea. Which, specifically, left her retching into the stainless steel kidney dish held before her remained poignantly ambiguous.

“Are you very well done?” that same voice asked, suffused with indifference, if not inconvenience. Fighting against the pall of sleep threatening just beyond the edge of her vision, Widowmaker dug into what little reserve of will she possessed to take in her surroundings: empty cots; many-armed surgical assistance bots; glass front cabinets and shelves well-stocked with a remarkable gamut of implements; Moira.

There was the nausea again.

Moira O’Deorain loomed at her side, a brutalistic composition of angles and shadow supporting the tray in one gloved hand. Widowmaker forced herself to meet the geneticist’s mismatched eyes and found, predictably, the sort of expectant impatience more frequently reserved for misbehaving or unruly children.

“Well?” Moira asked, single eyebrow raised as if to underscore how terribly bothersome she found the situation.

“ _Oui_ ,” the sniper managed, voice barely touching a whisper. For a word that required so little, Widowmaker found the effort to produce it nigh gargantuan. Even the smallest movement of her jaw provoked a fresh jolt of pain that started somewhere along the right side of her skull and radiated outward. That, in turn, resulted in a reactive wince that only started the entire cycle of discomfort anew. Closing her eyes, the sniper took a leveling breath - also excruciating - and focused her attention on simply staying awake. This was, essentially, an intake evaluation, and nearly a decade in Talon’s employ taught her that cooperation now meant Moira could do her job, ensure a speedy recovery, and depart. The faster the sniper shouldered through this grisly reawakening, the faster she’d be on her feet — and the sooner Moira would be gone.

“Delightful,” the other woman murmured as she dropped the half-full dish into a nearby wastebin, its brief but useful life concluded with a weighted thud. Moira removed herself from the sniper’s bedside, repairing to the broad island at the center of the room. In addition to the consoles which allowed one to manually control the assorted bots positioned about the room as needed, its surface was covered by a neatly arranged grid of printouts, x-ray negatives, and charts. “Now, then,” she continued, plucking one of the documents from the table and slipping it beneath the clasp of a clipboard, “on a scale of one to ten, how is your pain?”

Widowmaker stared, torn between compliance and the ache caused by the mere thought of response.

“Amélie,” the doctor intoned expectantly.

“ _Huit_ ,” she hissed, forcing the syllable between her teeth with as little extraneous movement as possible.

“English, please.”

Again, she gawked at the other woman’s effortless detachment; this time, Moira glanced over the edge of the clipboard and met her gaze.

“Eight,” she grimaced.

Plucking a pen from the breast pocket of her lab coat, Moira popped the cap off with her thumb and took a few, quick notes. “Speech causes discomfort,” she noted, less a question than a statement of observable fact. “Unsurprising.”

As the other woman continued with her notation, Widowmaker peered downward and noticed, for the first time, the sling secured about her right arm and the intravenous port lodged expertly in the back of her opposite hand.

“Dislocation,” Moira said, her voice pulling the sniper’s attention back to herself. “Shall I go on? Just blink if yes.”

Widowmaker complied.

“Dislocation of the right shoulder,” the geneticist reiterated, stepping away from the island toward one of the cabinets lining the med bay’s far wall. As she continued, she set about procuring a handful of objects which she set gently on a rolling instrument stand. “Ribs three through five broken on right side. Perforation of the abdomen, right side. Nifty little fact—,” she paused, scooting the tray over to the sniper’s cot, “once a knife passes the abdominal wall, it rarely moves fast enough to penetrate the bowels. Lucky you.”

Lucky, Widowmaker thought with a note of bitter amusement, was about the last thing she felt.

Plucking a pre-measured vial and syringe from the stand, Moira pressed the needlepoint past the vial’s opening and recounted the sniper’s injuries as if they were items on an otherwise mundane shopping list: “Extensive fracturing of the skull, right side. Significant blood loss - remarkable, really, given modified heart rate and blood pressure. Grade three concussion. Which reminds me—,”

Widowmaker braced herself for the inevitable.

“—where do you live?”

Inhaling slowly, the assassin steeled herself against the portentous burn of muscle and bone preceding her reply.

“Presently: Venice.”

“What is your name?”

“Widowmaker.”

Moira’s silence succeeding her reply was cold enough even for her to feel.

“ _What is your name_?” Moira repeated, emphasizing each word independently. Widowmaker met and held the withering, imperious glance offered her for a long minute as nausea welled in the pit of her stomach, bleeding into a pain all its own. At last, she relented, averting her eyes.

“Amélie Lacroix,” she said, spitting the name like bile.

“Perfect,” the doctor nodded. Tapping the side of the syringe to ensure the absence of any stray bubbles, she leaned over the injured sniper and slid the needle into her temporary IV port, depressing the plunger with measured force. “We’ve most of the extensive work out of the way already. An intensive regimen of nanomachines, rest, and physical therapy and you’ll be operational in a few weeks. Now, count backwards from one hundred and we’ll get started.”

Somehow more exhausted then before, Widowmaker merely closed her eyes and obeyed.

* * *

Consciousness treated her somewhat more gently the second time around, creeping across anesthetic-fulled synapses with the heavy silence of a winter storm. The pain, too, was noticeably subdued - by all meant present, but denied a pivotal ounce of acerbity by whatever monumental cocktail of palliative medicine Moira supplied her. What fire still burned - and there was still quite a lot of it - did so beneath a thick swathe of ash, smoldering persistently while it awaited the inevitable come-down.

Though this was better, it was by no means “good”. Widowmaker understood the fragility of the human form well enough to accept there was no simply walking away from the extensive damage she had incurred. Even with all the nanotechnology and sedatives at Talon’s disposal - even with  _Moira_  - bones needed time to mend, muscles needed time to knit, and bodies, to her chagrin, held onto trauma with impressive vehemence.

It was going to be a long few weeks.

The med bay was empty now, though evidence of Moira’s sudden and unwelcome apparition remained: a few cardboard boxes tucked against the side of the room’s center island; her coat flung haphazardly over an otherwise unoccupied cot; a collection of folios and scholarly periodicals stacked atop an unmarked industrial steel crate. Most conspicuously, Widowmaker noted with with quiet alarm the absence of the handful of medical personnel Talon kept on retainer. The implications of their absence were disquieting at best.

“—not going in there, Sombra. That’s an order.”

“I just want to see her.”

“ _You’re_  the reason she’s in there. ‘Fist says you’re not going anywhere near her until you’ve debriefed.”

Conversation from the hallway beyond the bay filtered through the double doors. Widowmaker canted her head in its direction, constraining the movement to little more than a slight tilt to subvert the threatening ache along the back of her head and neck.

“ _Please_ , Gabe,” Sombra begged. Beyond the doors, she and Gabriel argued, voices ineffectually and erratically hushed as their independent attempts at assertion caused them to raise, then lower their voices in turn.

“Listen to me,” Reaper said, a hint of focused compassion softening his tone just so. “You don’t want to see her; not right now. It’ll only make whatever you feel worse. I promise.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Believe me, I do.”

Frowning, Widowmaker averted her gaze as a ghost of a memory came clawing back from the depths of her mind. Though time ensured the loss of detail, she recalled another act of incidental eavesdropping nearly a decade old, conducted similarly from the surface of a med bay cot. Then, she listened in a mix of confusion and curiosity as Moira proclaimed gleefully the success of the first phase of her “experiment” while Akande listened, peppering her with questions in trademark stolidity. That encounter predated the self-awareness that would ultimately allow her to draw the correlation between states of physical agitation and the specter of emotion - in that case, anger; this time, she understood the elevated thrum of her own pulse as irritation. She was  _right there_  and so palpably, existentially tired; moreover, Sombra and Gabriel’s conversation not only reignited the initial suspicion she’d harbored regarding their mission, but lent that suspicion a substantial amount of agonizing, undeniable credence.

It felt like a punch in the gut and, frankly, her gut had seen more than enough. As that irritation coalesced into the burdensome, leaden weight she attributed to sadness, Widowmaker simply settled back against the unyielding cot beneath her, swallowed the whine borne of the meeting of rigid surface and tender injury, and let her gaze drift aimlessly across the unremarkable surface of the ceiling above. Either this unwelcome moment would end or sleep would claim her anew; either was infinitely preferable to the present.

“You’re really going to stop me? You want to fucking _try_?”

Somewhere down the hall, the grating croak of metal on metal proclaimed the opening of a door.

“This is all very riveting,” Moira interjected, the tail end of her words trailing off into a yawn. “But you’ve been here twenty minutes and I do enjoy sleep on occasion. Could you please take your nattering anywhere else?”

A long, loud silence followed, stretching on for what felt like a year.

“Just… tomorrow. Okay?” Gabriel said at last, his tone somewhere between exasperated and plaintive. “Talk to Akande and you can see her tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Sombra grunted.

As the sound of light footsteps carried the hacker away, Widowmaker cast a sideways glance to the door, equally relieved and surprised Sombra didn’t further push her luck. While Moira provided Gabriel a brief update as to the implementation of regenerative nannites to expedite healing, Widowmaker felt that same shadow of déjà vu come worming back and, with it, the desperate wish she could be anywhere else.

“I might be so bold as to suggest now would be an optimal time for any necessary or supplemental recalibration,” the geneticist added. Widowmaker, unthinking, snapped to attention and ran headlong into a wall of wrenching discomfort so instantaneous and harsh she couldn’t even conceive of stifling the yelp that flew past her lips. With its dissolution, so, too, did the conversation in the hallway beyond peter to still nothingness.

“You know, maybe that isn’t one of your finer ideas,” Gabriel replied, heaping snide emphasis on “finer” in a way that made the convalescing assassin grateful for his beautifully unflinching capability to inform others of what he perceived as idiocy.

Moira’s retaliatory quiet spoke volumes to her displeasure. “Later, then,” she sniffed. As the shutting of her door echoed along the corridor, only Gabriel’s palpable disdain remained.

Though she couldn’t see him, Widowmaker could picture perfectly his expression: feigned indifference betrayed by the faintest upward curl of his lip, eyes narrowed on the doctor’s door as she disengaged with all the consideration regularly afforded an ant. She recalled that look so well, remembered the first time she saw it and recognized in Gabriel the same, seething dislike of Moira she harbored. She and Gabriel were things to her: “investments” and “experiments” that, while valuable on paper or display, were always precariously at risk of obsolescence.

Gabriel sighed, loud and heavy and sounding as tired as she felt. Despite the pang of dejection it caused her, Widowmaker wished, briefly, that Sombra were there lobbing witty rejoinders at Moira’s back. Shelving that desire for some future slight she knew would inevitably come, she returned her attention to the ceiling, idly tracing its contours until sleep graced her with its blissfully uneventful presence.

* * *

Tomorrow, as fate would have it, did not include a visit from Sombra; nor did the next day.

Widowmaker thought little of it: if it wasn’t Gabriel disallowing her visitation, it was Akande. If it wasn’t Akande, the sniper hardly found it unfair to assume of Moira some insistence her investment be left alone.

Truthfully, she didn’t mind. Those first few days confined to the med bay were far from her best. Though she was by no means a stranger to the heavy toll Talon’s line of work exacted on a body, Widowmaker was frankly astounded at the extent of her injuries and the resultant pain they caused her. Her frustration was compounded by the innate restlessness which governed her existence, now amplified by the frequent bouts of inactivity required of recovery. The result was a compound mixture of persistent discomfort and irritation that only fed the perpetual motion device of her anxiety. Everything hurt, and every day that passed amounted to another week of training to reattain the standard of conditioning she maintained for herself. Every second, every minute constituted the erosion of some degree of skill or finesse; that belief, like everything else, left her hopelessly cagey and acutely aware of the slowness with which her body seemed to respond to and incorporate the nanites implemented to facilitate rapid healing.

By all means, they were working. They just weren’t working fast enough.

On the fourth day, Moira begrudgingly cleared her for release from both the med bay and direct supervision, with the caveat she remain in bed the rest of the week.

“Small breaks here and there,” she explained, shouldering the bulk of the assassin’s weight as she guided her to her room with a tangible air of inconvenience. “Stretches, short walks; nothing more. If I so much as see you thinking about  _thinking_  of more, I will personally break your legs to ensure the rest of you mends.”

“That is very reassuring,” Widowmaker replied sarcastically, wincing at the dull ache bookending the statement.

Between the return to her own space, the assumption of increased autonomy, and the not insubstantial regimen of pain suppressants, she found herself capable of focusing on subjects beyond her own body for the first time in days. Unfortunately, that meant she inevitably returned to the mission itself and, consequentially, Sombra.

While restricted to the med bay and Moira’s constant attention, Widowmaker had neither the time, space, or bandwidth for any substantive consideration of what had happened; between the pain, the barrage of exams, and the imperative for rest, her thoughts were, while not exactly occupied, precluded. Now, with her wits at least somewhat about her and a sudden excess of free time, she met head-on a snowballing jumble of guilt, frustration, confusion, and hurt with which she was entirely unfamiliar: something deep, profound, and aching. With that came the questions: what, exactly happened? What went wrong? Why?

Combing through her memories for the first time in days, she pieced their mission back together bit by bit until there was only negative space left to fill - the skeleton of an event, devoid of the meat and flesh that gave it shape. What she could remember, she did with vivid detail: Sombra, leading them in an unremarkable infiltration; Sombra, leaving them behind; Sombra, surrounded by armed men; Sombra, suddenly there but so excruciatingly late. Every attempt at filling the gaps begat the same questions in the same sequence, the absence of any answers only serving as fuel for her frustration. Exhausted by the cyclicality of her own thoughts, Widowmaker sought distraction and found it in the small stack of books resting on her bedside table, topped with a hand-written note from Akande that simply read, “ _Take it easy. That’s an order._ ”

With the shadow of a smile, she tucked into the topmost paperback - an ancient-looking copy of Flaubert’s  _Salammbô_  - shouldering through her disquiet with pointed intentionality.

Hours passed, mostly uninterrupted save for the sporadic catnap, until the tinny grinding latches and plates made apparent the slow turn of the doorknob.

Glancing over the top of her book, Widowmaker met Sombra’s eye with catlike disinterest.

“Hey,” the hacker greeted her, gaze faltering. “How’re you doing?”

Closing Flaubert over one finger, Widowmaker scooted back against the headboard with deliberate gentility, righting herself against the headboard. The carefully-stitched incision along the line of her stomach screeched its dissatisfaction in a rolling wave of pain, gone as quickly as it appeared. “I am not dead,” she replied shakily, resisting the urge to shrug still-sore shoulders. “It is a plus.”

She watched Sombra, normally so self-assured, lingering behind the just-cracked door with all the cowed hesitancy of a child fully aware of their own misbehavior. That hesitant aversion - to her and to the uncomfortable situation before them - was so deeply contrary to the Sombra she knew that she almost invited her in out of pity alone. Pity, however, did not inform her invitation or the wave of the unbound hand signaled it; instead, it was that same, unfamiliar sorrow she struggled to identify and the want to see it addressed.

Closing the door behind her, Sombra crossed the room in a few, timid steps, scooting the sniper’s desk chair ahead of herself and positioning it adjacent the bed. Sitting heavily, she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and immediately blurted out the most graceless, albeit perceptibly sincere “I’m sorry” Widowmaker had ever heard her supply.

Taking a leveling breath, she dogeared her page and set the book on the mattress beside her, smoothing thin fingertips over the surface of her duvet as she considered her response. Widowmaker studied the woman before her, still in bedclothes despite their being well into the afternoon. Clothing aside, Sombra looked as if she hadn’t slept in days - and if she had, it certainly wasn’t restorative. One look was all that was required to see that Sombra had done her share of suffering, and even Widowmaker wasn’t cruel enough to add to it.

“I accept your apology,” she said at last. “Whatever you did, I do not think this was the outcome you intended.”

“It isn’t,” Sombra replied.

“What  _was_  your intent?”

Hanging her head, the hacker sighed, inhaled slowly, then sat back in her chair. “I arranged a meeting with Matin. I’d been fucking with them since the first mission we blew, and offered to stop in exchange for the virus they dropped on me. They finally said yes, but I didn’t trust them not to fuck me over. There’s only one of me; I needed backup. So I sold it to everyone like a takedown and left out the rest. I wanted that virus, spider. Bad.”

The truth felt like a slap in the face, raw and sharp.

“You lied,” Widowmaker said matter-of-factly.  _There_  was that peculiar mess of unnameable affectivity, buoyed by the sudden understanding of what went wrong. Finally, she could attach a name to it: betrayal.

“I lied.”

Pinching the bridge of her nose, the sniper closed her eyes as the sting of Sombra’s admission washed over her. “We would have helped you. _I_ would have helped you.”

Sombra looked askance of her, violet eyes settling anywhere but on her.

Widowmaker frowned. “I understand. You lie. I expect there will always be secrets. But on assignment, Sombra? Do you not trust me? Have I misinterpreted… this?” She accompanied the question with a wave of her free hand between them.

“I trust you,” the spy muttered.

“ _Do_  you?”

As she pulled her knees into her chest, Sombra offered a single, plaintive nod. “I do. I just— I’m used to working alone, playing everything close to the chest. I  _have_  to do it that way; I can’t  _not_  do it that way. It’s how you stay alive, doing what I do; it’s how  _I_  stay alive.”

“I do not care if you lie to me every single day for the rest of my life as long as it causes no unnecessary danger,” the sniper explained. “This was incredibly unnecessary.”

Again, Sombra nodded her affirmation, this time lifting her gaze to meet the other woman’s. “I’m sorry I’m such a shit.”

Widowmaker pursed her lips, her expression softening incrementally. “You did a shitty thing. It is not what you are.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see.”

“Look,” the sniper said, extending her hand to Sombra. She accepted it with some hesitation, eyeing the gesture with due suspicion before lacing her fingers through her own. “No amount of making you feel bad fixes this. You fix it by not doing it again.”

Though the hurt lingered - and Widowmaker suspected it would for some time - the clear sincerity of Sombra’s apology and the emotion informing it allowed the sniper a modicum of quiet, internal reconciliation. She couldn’t say she felt better, or that the situation was improved by any observable metric, but this was a start: a place from which to move forward and a foundation upon which she could allow Sombra to rebuild her trust. Nothing was ideal, but, then again, few things ever were for spies and assassins.

“I’ll do my best,” Sombra agreed.

“That is good enough.”


	5. Self Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By E.   
> Gross old wine happens.

“Sombra?”

Widow’s voice woke the hacker from her half-slumber, pulling her consciousness to the forefront of her mind.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you laying on the floor?”

Sombra frowned, palms feeling the cold wooden paneling, fingers stretching like spiders along the ground. Some part of her wasn’t surprised, but that wasn’t the part that was capable of speaking right then.

“The floor?” she asked, confused as she stared up at the ceiling. Somehow, she noticed every single cobweb draped against the shadows, and it bothered her more knowing that they must have been there for a long time to attain such an impressive shape.  _Does anyone even clean this place_?

“Yes,” came the spider’s voice, more patient than the cogent part of her brain felt she probably deserved. “The floor. You are on it.”

“Oh.”

Groaning, she pushed herself up, sitting awkwardly on what she now agreed was the hard wood floor of the mansion livingroom. She wasn’t sure at what point she decided it was a good idea, but that was neither here nor there.

Widowmaker, looking much better after some time in recovery but still showing the wear and tear of her fall, reached down. “Come on,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Come on where?” Sombra asked, head spinning like a carousel, minus the horses. Mostly what she saw were vague shapes, many of which looked like her making the same mistake over and over again.

_Ugh._

She took Widow’s hand, trying to ignore the comforting coolness it imparted in favor of just standing up, but in the end, she couldn’t make herself let go.

“Are you drunk?” Widow asked, her tone curious, not critical. She allowed Sombra to maintain her grip, fingers curled against her palm. It was a blessing on many fronts, as she was uncertain how adept she would have been at standing on her own right then.

“Probably,” Sombra replied miserably.

“Did you drink the whole thing?” Widow asked, looking at the empty wine bottle on the floor by the hacker’s feet. It was laying on its side, dry as a bone.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head.

Widowmaker raised an eyebrow.

“Honest. It was half empty already.”

“Come on,” Widow said, a reluctant sort of smile pulling at her lips as she slipped her arm under Sombra’s shoulders. “Let’s get you to bed.”

They stumbled up the stairs, mostly as a result of Sombra’s limited ability to find a straight line, but the spider - still strong even in her recovery - led her without incident to her bedroom. She helped the hacker into her pyjamas, despite her pitiful complaints, and tucked her into bed.

“Hey,” Sombra said, fighting as sleep gained a hold of her. She knew she’d regret drinking that wine, but she’d figured she’d at least have until the morning to deal with it. Now, with Widow watching over her when it should have been the other way around, she felt a blanket of guilt wash over her along with the down spread tucked under her chin, and wondered what had possessed her in the first place.

“Yes?” she spider asked, slipping Oso under the blankets alongside the hacker.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Widow replied. Leaning over, she placed the lightest of kisses on the shaved side of Sombra’s head. “Now sleep.”

For once in her life, Sombra did as she was told.

* * *

When she woke up, she woke up confused and very dehydrated. The bed felt smaller; depressed somehow, and yet familiar at the same time. Groaning as she dragged herself to consciousness, she rolled over to find Widowmaker asleep beside her. It looked as though she’d passed out on top of the covers, fully dressed, hair pulled back into her usual tight ponytail. A part of her faintly remembered the spider stroking her hair and quietly singing her to sleep with some French lullabye, but it could just as easily have been a dream. In either case, she awoke with  _Alouette_  stuck in her head and thinking it only appropriate that Widowmaker would sing her a cute song about slowly dismembering a lark.

Sombra lay there, head pounding, watching her sleep for a long time. It had been two weeks since their incident in the warehouse, and as selfish as it sounded, sometimes she thought that Widowmaker was healing faster than she was. They hadn’t seen each other much, primarily because Widow was on bedrest up until very recently, but in part because Sombra wasn’t entirely sure how to express how desperately sorry she was. Nothing seemed adequate enough to make up for her actions, and every apology felt weaker than the one that came before. She was unpracticed in the art of atoning for her sins, mostly because she’d never been in a position to have to. Her slights were intentional; the victims never demanded an apology because they rarely knew who she even was.

As a result, she’d taken mostly to hiding in her room, diving into the endless trivial tasks foisted upon her as a thinly-veiled punishment for her actions by Akande, wondering how a person so savvy at communication could simultaneously be such a total idiot.

Sighing, she flopped on her back and stared at the ceiling.

“Good morning,” she spider said, waking up without fanfare. “How do you feel?”

“Like garbage.”

She didn’t look at Widowmaker as the sniper stood up from the bed, walking into the bathroom, figuring she’d grown tired of her already. A moment later, though, she returned, kneeling on the bed to offer Sombra a glass of water.

“You are dehydrated,” she said, holding it out. Sombra pushed herself to a seated position and took the glass of cool water, downing it in one go.

“Yeah, probably,” she said, almost instantly feeling the effects of the water on her system. Her head still ached, but the tightness in her jaw was starting to lighten up. Widowmaker held out her hand and Sombra returned the glass to her. “Thanks.”

The spider watched her out of those piercing golden eyes, holding a silence that was too long for comfort but one that Sombra was just too tired to break. Eventually Widow did it for her.

“Alcohol does not make things better,” she said, leaning against the pillow.

“No, but it makes you unconscious.” Widowmaker raised an eyebrow, and Sombra sighed. “I know. I just needed to get out of my head for a minute.”

“With a half a bottle of wine?”

“Don’t worry, it wasn’t your good wine,” she said, halfheartedly attempting a joke. She was starting to feel like she might need more than just water to stave off this hangover. “It was leftover from like a month ago.”

Widowmaker recoiled, wrinkling her nose. “You  _drank_  that?”

Sombra shrugged, offering her the barest smile. “I figured I was doing us a service by removing it from the shelf.”

“Do you want to talk?” Widowmaker asked. The change in topic was so abrupt that Sombra almost missed it and offered a joke instead of a serious response. The adrenaline from the conversational shift did help momentarily dull the pain of her headache, though.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

Sombra winced, Widowmaker’s words feeling like a chastisement even though she didn’t think they were meant to be. She was turning this into a conversation about her, and despite her deep regret at what happened, she hadn’t been the one betrayed.

“How are you doing?” she asked, finally, eying the lingering bruises along the spider’s body, knowing that more lay just underneath the folds of her clothing. She had so few scars from her scrapes with disaster, and it cut to Sombra’s core that she was the reason for one of them.

“Physically healing. Otherwise, I am sad, I think,” Widowmaker replied thoughtfully after some hesitation, hand curled under her head as she rested on her elbow. “That is the word I have settled on: I am sad.”

Sombra swallowed another ‘I’m sorry’ and searched for something more constructive to reply with. “That’s fair,” she settled on. “I would feel the same.”

 

“I am sad but I would like not to be.” Widow said, fingers brushing lightly against Sombra’s across the bed. Sombra turned her hand palm up and the spider took it, her cold skin a balm against the scathing heat of her failure. “It is unpleasant. You are…not supposed to make me sad,  _mon coeur_.”

Widow’s words cut into her the way only the truth can. “I just don’t know how to make it up to you,” Sombra said simply. It was the crux of the issue, really.

“You don’t. You cannot right what you did,” she said, eyes locked on Sombra’s. “You can only do better.”

Sombra considered this, willing herself to start letting go of the guilt she held inside that was preventing her from actually mending the bridge she had nearly burned. Maybe Widow was right - perhaps she was too focused on fixing her mistakes. Maybe she just had to stop making them.

“Okay,” she said, exhaling out her frustration and guilt. “I said I would do my best, and I will. I’m going to do better.” She looked over at her. “So where do we go from here?”

Widowmaker raised a thin eyebrow and leaned forward, one arm draped over Sombra’s body as she brought herself closer to the hacker. Sombra could feel her thigh pressing against her, and a familiar heat rose to her cheeks.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Sombra said, holding back from her touch, the feeling of trepidation unfamiliar to her.

Widowmaker’s smile turned into a smirk. “It’s a kiss,  _cherie_ , not a boxing match.”

Sombra laughed, more easily than she had in weeks, and willed herself to let go of her fear as she took the sniper’s cool face in her hands. As she pressed her lips against Widow’s, she felt her world begin, slowly, to right itself.

Things were not ok - but they would be in time.


End file.
